1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to land restoration and reclamation. More specifically, this invention relates to arid land soil crust restoration by distribution of locally obtained live organisms in a liquid suspension onto the disturbed soil.
2. Related Art
Environmental degradation due to energy exploration, environmental disturbances (e.g. fire), and various land use practices (e.g. grazing) have created conditions in the arid west region of the United States that are increasingly difficult and exceedingly costly to restore with any permanence. To avoid ecosystem collapse and desertification, federal regulatory agencies and private industry are willing and obligated to restore these degraded lands. Despite the critical ecological role of biological soil crusts (BSC) in arid ecosystems, there are few, if any, currently available methods or products for efficiently and affordably inoculating BSC onto disturbed lands.
In the USA West, the need for a sustainable one time application of a product that promotes native diversity while achieving soil stabilization and weed abatement are of immediate concern. Over the course of the next decade, about 100,000 oil and gas wells are slated for construction on public lands across western states, of which about 51,000 will be drilled in Wyoming. Invasion of annual weeds and non-native perennial grasses such as cheatgrass and crested wheatgrass have severely altered western fire regimes. Consequently millions of acres burn each year. Unfortunately, current technology is not well able to effectively and affordably restore these damaged lands.
Between the 2007 fire season that burned 9.2 million acres nationally, not counting wildfires still burning at the end of the year in California, and the expanding energy development across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico, land in the arid western U.S. land is being destroyed at record rates. Rehabilitation is needed, but without technological advances in restoration practices, the amount of land left environmentally degraded will continue to grow. Biological soil crusts (BSC) are a complex mosaic of cyanobacteria, green algae, lichens, mosses, microfungi, and other bacteria. BSC have a major influence on terrestrial ecosystems, including soil fertility and soil stability; in the arid and semi-arid ecoregions of the world they may constitute as much as 70% of living cover. In the western U.S. BSC are critical components of healthy ecosystems. BSC cover the cold deserts of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, the hot deserts of the Mojave and Sonora, and the coastal chaparral shrublands of California. Despite their ecological significance, BSC are not currently part of arid land restoration in any of these areas.
Innovations in restoration are needed to rehabilitate current and future disturbances. Ecological restoration is the attempt to return an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, transformed or entirely destroyed as the direct or indirect result of human activities to its natural trajectory. The existing paradigm for rehabilitating land after fires or oil and gas drilling is to replace vegetation through seeding, augment nutrient deficiencies with chemical fertilizers, and control weeds with herbicides. Advancements in seeding equipment designed for wildlands, and the release of native grass germplasms for agricultural production have improved dryland restoration. Still, reestablishing vegetation in the arid desert regions of the West remains challenged by low precipitation and unstable and unfertile topsoil.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,969,844 (Fogel, et al.) discloses a soil treatment method wherein algae in a culture medium containing at least 10% nitrogen are inoculated onto soil, provided with supplemental nutrients and moisture, and allowed to multiply.
Reclamation and Revegetation Research, 4 (1986) pp 261-269 is an article entitled “Rapid Stabilization of Fire-Disturbed Sites Using A Soil Crust Slurry: Inoculation Studies”, which discloses inoculation of a fine-disturbed site with a soil crust obtained near the burn which had been slurried in water.
J. Phycol 29, pp. 140-147 (1993) is an article entitled “Cryptogamic Crusts of Semiarid And Arid Lands of North America”, which is a mini-review of the topic of soil algal crusts.
U.S. Published Patent Application No. US 2009/0056214 discloses a method for enhancing soil crust formation by treating disturbed soil with a suspension containing microfloral propagules collected with runoff water from undisturbed sites.
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